Serving your needs with Bigin toppings

Hey Biginners!

We're excited to kick off our Developer Community series on building toppings for Bigin, and our goal is to provide an accessible, beginner-friendly, and relevant path for every developer.

Imagine creating tiny pieces of software that unlock enhanced functionalities and seamlessly integrate Bigin with other applications. Those pieces of software are Bigin's "toppings."

Let's dive in!

What are toppings?

Toppings are add-ons that help you to integrate Bigin with other third-party applications or extend existing functionalities, eliminating the need for Bigin users to switch between multiple service-providing applications. With Bigin's Developer Center, developers can build toppings and bundle them into all the features necessary to manage the businesses they serve. Users can install them in their Bigin accounts to enhance their user experiences with custom features and integrations.

How are toppings useful?

Imagine using Bigin and managing your business via different pipelines that cater to different business departments, like sales and support. On a daily basis, the customer support team may receive multiple emails related to these different departments; manually checking each email and saving them as records in the appropriate pipelines would be a time-consuming process and might lead to errors. Bigin's Email-In topping serves to address this functional inefficiency. By creating unique email aliases for different departments, Email-In ensures that any emails sent to these aliases are automatically converted into records in the related Bigin pipeline, eliminating manual intervention, saving time, and reducing the risk of errors. Teams can focus on responding to customers quickly rather than spending hours sorting and categorizing emails.

Or consider another scenario: A business is juggling multiple client meetings, managing several projects, and finding it difficult to track contracts and renewal dates. Without a system in place to manage these contracts, they run the risk of missing renewals, disrupting client relationships, and losing revenue. What they'd need is a topping that helps them organize their contracts in Bigin, set automated reminders for renewals or expirations, and seize every opportunity. Then, the team can focus more on nurturing customer relationships instead of worrying about missing crucial deadlines.

These scenarios highlight the important role toppings can play in business processes.

Now, let's explore where you can build toppings and the features available there.

Bigin Developer Center

To develop a topping for Bigin, make sure you have access to the Bigin Developer Center. You also need to have a clear picture of the functionalities and features you want to include in your topping.

The Bigin Developer Center is a cloud platform that provides developers with ready-to-use tools to create and publish toppings. In the Developer Center, each developer has a designated developer workspace where they can create and manage toppings. From the workspace screen, you can create a topping and enter the Bigin Developer Console, which serves as the space wherein you'll build, test, and publish your toppings, and offers various components to create, customize, and automate them. Read more about the platform's functionalities here.

Once you've developed a topping, the next step is to decide how you want to distribute it. For that, let's look into the types of toppings available.

Types of toppings you can build

Toppings can be either public or private, depending on the distribution method you choose, which in turn defines its visibility to users.

Public toppings

Public toppings are accessible to all users and listed in the Bigin Marketplace, an online store where users can find and install toppings. Users can also search for specific toppings or filter them from the available list.

This enables topping developers to generate revenue based on the number of times their toppings are installed. Based on user ratings and reviews, developers can periodically improve and enhance their toppings. The Bigin Marketplace team has provided guidelines for creating public toppings. Once a developer submits the topping, the Marketplace team will review and approve it, provided that it complies with the established approval policies.

Private toppings

You can create or use private toppings for specific users or organizations. The Developer Console generates a hashed URL that allows access to these toppings and enables you to control how your toppings are distributed.

Private toppings don't require approval from the Bigin Marketplace team and receive validation automatically. Once published, these toppings are immediately available for use. You can publish toppings privately if you want to provide an organization or client with customized features.

How to build a topping

Let's dive into the step-by-step process of creating a topping.

Accessing the Bigin Developer Center

1. Log in to or sign up for Bigin's Developer Center.

Note: The Bigin Developer Center is currently available in the US Data Center (DC). If your existing Bigin account is in another DC, you can still develop toppings by creating a free account in the US DC. To create a developer account, please contact our support team, and they'll assist you in setting it up.

2. After logging in successfully, access the Bigin Developer Center and enter a name for your workspace.

3. Click the Create Workspace button to set it up.

4. Once you create your workspace, you'll land on the Developer Center screen, where you can build your toppings.

Creating a topping

1. On the Developer Workspace screen, find and click the Create Topping button in the top-right corner.

2. Provide details for your new topping.

Enter the desired name for your topping in the Name field. The Unique Namespace is automatically created using the name you provide. Remember, you cannot change the namespace after you create the topping.

1. Provide a brief overview of what your topping does in the Description field.
   
2. Select the Terms and Conditions checkbox and click Save.
   

Now that your new topping has been created, it's ready to be customized. In the next post, we'll dive into the components and features available in the Bigin Developer Console to build your topping.

Stay tuned for more!

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